What Every Website has to Have
If you are trying to build or maintain a website on the cheap, you may be wondering what is the least that you have to have in order to have a website. There are 3 (technically two) things that you must have, regardless of which company or individual you hire:
Domain registration
This is the name of your website. For example, ours is seounpacked.com. Consider this to be like a plot of land. You bought it and you now have an address. If you stop here and do nothing else, the land is empty.
Hosting
This is where all of the elements that go into your website - photos, text, plugins, etc. - are stored. If your domain is a plot of land, hosting is a house that you can customize and decorate however you want. Hosting can often be purchased from the same company as your domain registration, but it may also be purchased through a different company.
If you cancel your hosting or your domain registration without finding a new provider, your website will go down and people will not be able to access it.
WordPress Maintenance (optional, kind of)
Your website will still be accessible even without WordPress maintenance, but it is almost guaranteed to experience issues sooner or later. Any WordPress site is made up of a theme and multiple plugins. The developers of those themes and plugins, as well as WordPress’ developers, frequently publish updates to these plugins. For reference, we maintain 30+ websites and we typically complete over 100 updates each week.
In most cases, a live person needs to install these updates on your website to ensure performance and security. These aren’t necessarily complicated, you could probably complete them on your own with very little training. However, repairing a site that hasn’t been properly maintained can be both complex and expensive. If you don’t have backups, your website may have to be rebuilt from scratch, depending on the scale of the issue.
There are several other services and products that can improve your website, including:
SEO
SSL certificate
Image Optimization
Downtime Monitoring
Backups
Security Check
None of these things are required in order to have a website. They are tools intended to prevent hacks as well as improve functionality, design, and how often your website appears in search results.
Depending on your needs, a minimalist website with just hosting, domain registration and maintenance may be sufficient. If you are looking to promote your business or attract new customers online, you will need to incorporate some of the elective services as well in order to ’ll need to consider some of the elective options as well.
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